Now Love had come.
He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as best he could, for he was a brave man;—only he had wrestled with fate so long, and it seemed always to beat him, and almost he grew tired.
He cut a week's fodder for the beasts, and left all things in their places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to go.
Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad white foreheads and soft noses over their stable door.
He turned and stroked them in farewell.
"Poor beasts!" he muttered; "shall I never muzzle and yoke you ever again?"
His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man who sails for a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor any other can tell whether he will ever return.
He might come back in a day; he might come back never.
Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. But to him it was as though he set forth on the journey which men call death.
In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their white brows. There was no one there to see his weakness, and year on year he had decked them with their garlands of hedge flowers and led them up on God's day to have their strength blessed by the priest—their strength that laboured with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.